Scoring is Down in the Arizona Fall League

This was going to be a post about performance of Mets’ farmhands out in the desert in the Arizona Fall League, but instead it turned into a post about league itself.

I was going to apply the usual AFL caveat that this is an extreme hitters’ league and thus, one should treat the numbers produced by both hitters and pitchers with a light touch, or normalize them for league values. Then I looked at the numbers. The AFL is still is absolutely a hiters’ league, but it is less so than in recent years.

This year, the AFL is hitting a collective .266/.344/.397 and scoring 5.2 runs per game. That’s roughly comparable in terms of scoring to the 2012 version of the Pacific Coast League (.278/.345/.430; 5.1 R/G), but with a little less power. However, it is the lowest level of offense for the AFL in the last five years. The AFL’s isoloated slugging, a measure of power, is down to its lowest level in eight years (before that the data is scattered and hard to collect). On a year over year basis, AFL scoring is down 13%.

What’s going on here? I do not know, although I’m open to suggestions. Some potential explanations follow.

The league’s season is only two weeks old and this is just a dreaded small sample size blip. By November, the AFL’s power and scoring numbers will be right back to their recent historical levels. This we can test by waiting a month.

Perhaps teams are sending younger, less experienced and thus less powerful prospects to the AFL. The Mets’ delegation this year is a strong example of this. Among the position players, the Mets sent two outfielders from Advanced-A (Darrell Ceciliani and Cesar Puello) and an infielder from low-A (Dustin Lawley). There is not a single regular season AA plate appearance among this group. (This too is testable by comparing the average age of the players in this year’s AFL delegations to year’s past.)

The decline is a reflection of the overall decline in offense in baseball at the MLB level. (This is testable too – do AFL scoring and power levels track those in MLB closely?)